Childhood Games
by The Writer Triumphant
Summary: Tired of Carly's relationships and Freddie's lack of, Spencer and Mrs. Benson plot to find them true love with one another. Not surprisingly, the plan backfires. Prequel to Dear Freddork and Dearest Samantha.
1. Scrabble

**Notes:** Heavily inspired by a fanfic in the _Teen Titans_ fandom and conversations on the couch during commercials.  
**Background Music:**"I Got a Girl" Tripping Daisy

**Disclaimer:** The awesomeness that is _iCarly_ wrapped up in a quirky Seattle belongs to Dan- the CREATOR MAN - Schneider.

* * *

**Part One: Scrabble**

"Sam, I know that the Dictionary is the only book you read without pictures, but there is no way that's an actual word."  
"Look it up, Benson."  
Carly rolled her eyes and considered the spray bottle under the sink. Maybe it was just the rain, but today her friends were bickering more than usual. They argued before class about why Sam should have been doing her own homework last night instead of staying up to watch some lame horror movie with clowns because if she had, she wouldn't have been pestering Freddie via text at two in the morning for answers. They argued over lunch about why Freddie's mom insisted on packing healthy lunches that Sam had no benefit in mooching off of. They argued on the way home over the video they were going to use on that night's show. And now they were arguing over a game of Scrabble because Sam _insisted_ that "Litvak" was an actual word.  
"_Litvak_," Sam recited, hands on hips ala Benson-you-_nub_, "Noun. A Jew from Lithuania or a neighboring country/region."  
Freddie gaped and sputted something that Carly translated as "Just because _you're_ Jewish…"  
"That's 20 points for me, and the game," Sam replied smugly, waving her empty tile rack around his nose.  
Sensing a confrontation, Carly stood up at once and declared they should have snacks.

* * *

"And _that's_ the plan."  
Marissa Benson chewed on a nail, eyes popping out in frantic anxiety. "Are you sure about this, Spencer? It doesn't sound very safe…" she began.  
Spencer looked ceilingward - _Gas bubble!_ - and thought of pointing out that Mrs. Benson thought _plastic snap buttons_ were unsafe. Sadly, there was no way to execute this plan without the help of Freddie's mom, and bringing up unsafe fastenings was not the way to win her over. "I thought you might say that…" he said aloud. "And that's why I went ahead and set it up already."  
She stopped chewing on her nail immediately and pinned him with a look of utter shock. "You _what?!_" she screeched. Spencer winced.  
"It'll be okay!" he reassured her, waving his arms around in the space between them, anticipating an attack. "I had an emergency kit installed last year, and I'm wasn't the one who worked out the technical stuff. I paid the guy who fixed it last month set it up this morning." "Wasn't he very unreliable?"  
"Uh… no. Just really slow about getting it done."  
"Well, I'm very upset that you set it up without telling me all the details, Spencer!" she chided, shoving him out the door and across the hall. "You'd better hope we're not too late to stop them."  
In her frenzied Mother Hen mode, she deftly knocked his wrist aside and turned the key herself, jolted when the chain lock denied her. The She pushed it open enough to get her face between the door and its frame, and a loud electronic hissing _thump_ issued from within, followed by a trio of shouts in rapid succession.  
"Freddie!" she cried, pummeling her shoulder against the door. Spencer made a mental note to get yet another chain lock for their door and nearly collided with her in front of the couch.  
Carly was standing there, a shattered bowl of bacon nacho cheese at her feet, eyes incredibly wide.  
"Freddie and Sam are stuck in the elevator!" she said, pointing.  
Well, in all fairness, the brilliant plan hadn't been _wasted_, exactly. More like screwed six ways to Sunday.  
"GET ME OUT OF HERE!"  
"Carly! Get my mom!"  
"I'm here, Freddie!" Mrs. Benson cried, pushing Carly out of the way to stand in front of the elevator.  
"I'M STUCK!"  
"We're both stuck, Sam!"  
"SHUT UP, BENSON!" This exclamation followed by a loud smacking sound and a groan.  
"Mom…"  
Carly buried her face in her hands. "Sam, please don't kill Freddie!"

* * *

It took twenty minutes to get the elevator repairman on the phone, and before Spencer could get a whole sentence out, Mrs. Benson intervened yet again, shooting a "_You'd better get down and fix this immediately!!_" into the mouthpiece of the phone. Carly, meanwhile, was guiding her friends along the back wall to open the panel that hid the emergency kit.  
"Can't we just use the escape hatch?" Freddie whined.  
"If we can fit your fat butt through, Benson."  
Carly made an exasperated face. "It's too small. The last time we had to get the elevator fixed they had to close up the big one to install that hydraulic cable-whatever to make sure that the next time it failed it wouldn't drop faster than the _Tower of Terror_. The new one is only big enough to access the emergency she new one is only big enough to access the emergency she new one is only big enough to access the emergency she new one is only big enough to access the emergency switch, which doesn't do us much good, since Freddie's mom threatened the repairman already."  
"Can you at least shove a sandwich though there?" Sam pleaded.  
"A ham sandwich," Freddie added. "I don't want to be the only thing around when she gets hungry." This was followed by the sound of scuffling. Carly guessed that Freddie had been kicked.  
"Don't you dare hurt my Freddie, Missy!" Mrs. Benson snapped, pounding on the elevator door once. Sam made a retching noise.  
"Don't call her that, mom," Freddie whimpered. The doorbell rang.  
"It's about time!" Mrs. Benson raged, dragging the repairman in. "What kind of idiot agrees to tamper with an elevator at the request of a – a hapless idiot!"  
Spencer tried to look as though he wasn't a hapless idiot at all. Carly's mouth and eyes were suddenly very big.  
"Spencer... what does she mean, he _agreed_ to do this?"  
Under fire from both women, Spencer and the repairman exchanged looks of desperation.  
"I did it for your own good!" he cried, leaping over the couch and making a break for his room. The repairman made a dash around Mrs. Benson and started pulling out tools as fast as he could in an attempt to keep her at bay. Carly buried her face in her hands again and retreated to the kitchen. She had every intention of telling Sam whose fault it was that she was stuck in the elevator with Freddie.

* * *

"Give me your sandwich or die, Benson."  
"Carly made five! and you just inhaled four! This one's mine!"  
Sam raised en eyebrow, ala Momma-is-_not_-amused, Benson and snatched it away. Whatever possessed the kid to think that he could stand up to her? – in a halted elevator, no less! "_Sam_," he protested.  
There it was. The faintest stab of guilt. Groaning, she tore the sandwich in half and pretended she didn't notice when she threw him the bigger half.  
"This is _agonizing_," she grumbled, slouching into the corner.  
Most of Carly's face appeared through the opened emergency switch window. "I've got fatcakes and Scrabble!" she called, trying to sound cheerful, like a mom popping in on her kid and the neighbor girl while they were up in his treehouse.  
"Scrabble?" Sam asked, sitting up a little.  
"So you won't get bored. The repairman's got Freddie's mom standing over him and his every move, so I think it'll be another twenty minutes...?" she speculated, shoving a dozen fatcake packages through plus the folded up Scrabble board, two trays and the bag of tiles. Freddie heaved an annoyed sigh.  
"What's wrong, Freddork? Can't taking losing to me any more today?" Sam asked around a huge bite of fatcake. Freddie considered it a skill to be able to understand what she was saying. "My mom's going to smother me for the rest of the week after we get out," he explained. Sam grinned.  
"Probably." Throwing him a tray, she set up the board and passed him his tiles. X, D, M, I, L, B. What a lousy rack. She knew it, too, by the way she was grinning.  
He spelled out "DIM" on the board and drew an A and a T.  
Sam took his D and finished it up with "-ORK".  
"_Sam..._"  
"Don't you dare tell me that's not a word, Freddie," she threatened, holding up a fist.  
He added "-AT" to her R. She punched his shoulder.  
The whole elevator shuddered and dropped an inch.  
Sam added "-ATCAKE" to Freddie's "FINK". He countered with an S and "-UPID". She knocked over the board and wrestled him into the opposite corner.  
"Don't kill each other!" Carly's voice warned from above.

* * *

It took another half hour to get the elevator to respond to the light panel, and when it finally opened, Carly crossed her fingers behind her back and prayed. The floor was littered with fatcake wrappers and Scrabble tiles, as expected. The surprising thing, however, was Sam's head in Freddie's lap. She was fast asleep, and the look on his face was bewildered.  
"Uh... I don't want to wake her," he said slowly. "Could you just close the door again?" Mrs. Benson gaped.


	2. Hangman

**Notes:** Heavily inspired by a fanfic in the _Teen Titans_ fandom and conversations on the couch during commercials.  
**Background Music:**"Getchoo" Weezer

**Disclaimer:** The awesomeness that is _iCarly_ wrapped up in a quirky Seattle belongs to Dan- the CREATOR MAN - Schneider.

* * *

**Part Two: Hangman**

"So you meant to trap _me_ in there?"  
Carly's voice cracked on the edge of what Spencer would term a hysterical reaction.  
"Uh... yes."

"And how, exactly, would that have been _for my own good_?" she asked, her tone falling into the I'm-much-more-sensible-than-you-even-though-I'm-younger register that made Spencer feel awkward.  
"Well... Mrs. Benson was in on it, too!" he recalled suddenly. Carly wasn't buying it. "No, really! I was tired of you bringing home boyfriends that aren't your type, and she was tired of Freddie pinning after you, so we figured that if we stuck you in an elevator for an hour or two it would bring you closer together. See! Totally for your own good."  
"I can't _believe_ you!" she screeched in response, swatting his arm. "Jamming the elevator to play cupid is not only dangerous, it's _stupid_. And you can't think that being stuck in there for an hour would change my mind about Freddie. He's been trying to woo me for almost two years and it hasn't worked!" She gave a cutely furious huff and stormed upstairs.

* * *

"And then she went to take a shower, and she hasn't come out yet!"  
"Well, she has every right to be upset, and so do I! I can't believe you dared endanger my Freddie like that!"  
Marissa Benson was the very definition of Mother, in Spencer's opinion.  
"Nothing happened!" he argued, voice tilting over a whine ledge.  
"But something could have! Especially since he was trapped with that Samantha for a whole hour!"  
Spencer scratched his head, wanting to just walk away and let her voice her concerns to his living room. But it was his living room.  
"Actually, about Sam," he began, taking a deep breath. Best to let the shit fit the fan all at once. "I was thinking... maybe we landed the right people in the elevator after all?"  
Mrs. Benson gave him a look that was, quite possibly, the most horrified expression he'd ever seen on her face, moreso even than the rampaging terror of two hours ago.  
"_I'd rather let Freddie go without his weekly tick bath._" she said in a threatening whisper.  
Spencer backed off. "Okay, then... you just think about it..." he railed off, darting into his room and locking the door.

* * *

  
"Sam, is there a reason our hangman is starting to look like me?" Freddie asked, exasperated.  
"I hope that's a rhetorical question, Freddie," Sam replied easily, adding a collar to the polo shirt of the figure on her yellow legal notepad.  
Carly took a long sip of her Strawberry Splatt and wondered when they started spending more time at the Groovy Smoothie. She remembered a month ago when they would simply pop in and get their drinks to go. Maybe they were growing up?  
Sam doodled lipstick on the Freddie hangman figure, and Freddie tried to snatch the pencil away.  
Fine. So they weren't growing up. Maybe they were just enjoying their time away from adults. Carly's fingernails dug into the Styrofoam. Spencer! He was so lucky she hadn't felt vengeful enough to let it drop that it had been all his fault.  
"X," Sam guessed to her right. They's torn up the first game and started a new one.  
Freddie frowned. "You mean 'Y'," he corrected her.  
"I said 'X', Freddison."  
"Yeah, but you _usually_ go: H, A, M, Y, P, E, O, G..."  
"We've only played two games," Sam interjected.  
"And in _both_ those games you went: H, A, M, Y, P, E, O, G... until you were hung," Freddie argued.  
"Do you know how creepy that is? Knowing the order of letters I use?" Sam's voice pitched up, and she looked, to Carly's trained eye, moderately flustered.  
"You're just that predictable!" Freddie countered, obviously defensive.  
_Well_.  
"Yiddish!" Carly exclaimed, breaking them out of their squabble.  
They stared at her with confusion.  
"Yiddish," she repeated, pointing to the notepad. Freddie recovered first and scribbled 'Y-I-D-D-I-S-H' into the blank lines.

* * *

  
"Okay, so I really want to keep being angry at you for the other day, but I'm starting to think that your plan didn't entirely backfire."  
Spencer, frozen in the middle of the living room with a sculpting tool in one hand and a mango in the other, nodded like an attentive schoolkid.  
"So I'm not going to tell Sam it was your fault she got stuck in the elevator with Freddie if you can help me think of a safer way to make sure they spend more time together. Alone."  
Carly waited for her brother to drop the items he was holding or to start laughing uncontrollably. "Uh... Spencer? You heard what I just said, right?"  
"Get Sam and Freddo together safely?" he summarized.  
"Uh-huh... and that doesn't... shock you?"  
"Actually, Mrs. Benson and I are ahead of you, but she still needs a little bit of convincing," he confessed.  
"_Mrs. Benson_ approves of this?" she asked suspiciously.  
"Well... not exactly. I mean, after the elevator fiasco, I got to thinking that maybe Sam rips on Freddie not because she hates him, but because it's her way of acknowledging him, and that maybe Freddie gets it and only lets on that it bothers him? Okay, not when she's taking shots at his budding masculinity or when she publicly humiliates him with pudding, but in general, y'know... but of course I didn't get that far in my argument because Mrs. Benson would apparently rather let Freddie live the rest of his life without tick baths than see him with Sam."  
Carly smiled and gave a sigh. "And that's where I come in, isn't it?"  
"Please?" Spencer danced on his tip toes.  
Snatching the mango away, Carly laughed and consented. "I'm going to peel and cut this up for you, and then I'll see what kind of mood she's in."  
"YES!"

* * *

  
She was in a cleaning mood.  
"I don't know what's up," Freddie explained. "I came home from the Groovy Smoothie and she was scrubbing the grout out of the bathroom tiles, and she's dusting and polishing stuff in the living room right now. She only cleans like this when she's got something heavy on her mind, but she hasn't told me anything."  
Carly chewed her bottom lip. "What about you?"  
"Huh?"  
"Don't you always write HTML when you've got something heavy on _your_ mind?" she prodded, indicating his computer screen.  
"Not always. Mostly I fence. Why?"  
"You want to tell me what happened with Sam the other day? In the elevator?"  
His face took a guilty expression. "Nothing! I told you! She ate about 8 fatcakes and insisted on using me as a pillow." He coded another sequence into the program he was writing for the site. "Jealous?" he added as an afterthought, hopeful.  
"No," she assured him with her same playful tone.  
He smiled.  
"I mean..." she sat down on his bed and was serious, for the first time. "No, Freddie. In fact, if you liked another girl, even Sam, I'd be happy for you. Not 'I'm just saying I'm happy to hide my disappointment' but real happy, because you're my friend. I won't ever be jealous of another girl with you."

* * *

  
"And he _asked_ me to leave him alone."  
"If you've hurt my Freddie..."  
"Maybe I did, but I realized that I was never serious when I rejected him, so maybe now he'll get it and he can move on."  
"And you want him to _move on_ to that Sam?" Mrs. Benson threw down her polishing rag and attacked the dining room table. The claws of anxiety began to gnaw inside of Carly's stomach.  
"Mrs. Benson, _you_ want him to move on to Sam."  
"I want no such thing!"  
"Yes, you do!" Carly insisted, pushing forward with her line of reasoning. "Think about it. If Freddie ended up with me, or any other girl, then I or she would probably treat him the same way you do."  
"And why wouldn't I want that?"  
Carly backed up a step. "Because then Freddie wouldn't need you anymore?"

* * *

  
"Why can't we call it operation Geeky Ham?" Spencer whined.  
"Because that's too obvious!" Carly snapped. "It has to be something ambiguous, and since Mrs. Benson is still torn up over this – namely me and you being right – that I let her name it, and it's Magnet, got it?"  
"_Fine_."  
"You can pick your own code name, though," Carly added hopefully. "I'm Web Princess. Mrs. Benson called Red Cross, and you're...?"  
"TUXEDO MAN," Spencer declared, cheered up, as Carly expected.


	3. Chess

**Notes:** Heavily inspired by a fanfic in the _Teen Titans_ fandom and conversations on the couch during commercials.

**Disclaimer:** The awesomeness that is _iCarly_ wrapped up in a quirky Seattle belongs to Dan- the CREATOR MAN - Schneider.

* * *

**Part Three: Chess**

"Tuxedo Man to Red Cross. Is Phase One complete?"  
"Positive is on his way over. I'm heading to the grocery store. And the pharmacy. For backup medical supplies."  
In his room, Spender grinned. "Web Princess is in the studio, and Negative is on the couch. I have planted the bomb." He straightened an imaginary bowtie. Man. Tuxedo Man.  
"It had better not catch on fire."  
"It's a cardboard and plastic chess set. It won't catch fire."  
"You've set the bell in the lobby on fire."  
"This is different!" Spencer whined. "I'm nowhere near it!"  
"Fine. Over and out."  
"Over and out!"  
Spencer released the button and did a little one-two-step with his reflection, then shrieked – it was a manly shriek! – when the walkie-talkie caught fire.

* * *

"Where's Carly? She said she wanted me to show her how to HTML a poll for iCarly."  
Sam looked up from a generously packed and stacked sandwich, courtesy of Carly herself, and shrugged. Freddie didn't' sound too good, but he was wearing a belt and when a drop of mustard stained the TV remote in her lap he did that thing with his eyebrows.  
"She said she had to go down to storage with Spencer to help him dig up something they were supposed to mail to her dad, I think."  
He gave no response, choosing to collapse onto the couch beside her, setting his laptop down on the coffee table.  
"Know how long she'll be down there?" he asked, wincing at the huge bite she took.  
Again, she shrugged. "Nope. Aren't you gonna run down there like a knight to a damsel in distress to help her out?"  
He gave a bitter half laugh. "Nah. Why bother? She'll never love me, right?"  
Sam choked a little on the tomato and sat up. "Run that by me again, Frederly?"  
He shrugged. "Time I stopped deluding myself, don't you think?"  
Sam breathed easily when he gave her a relaxed smile, then covered it up by bolting the rest of the ham, biting her finger.  
"Never thought I'd see the day," she muttered, allowing herself a small smirk.  
He laughed openly at that. "Yeah, well I've seen you in a skirt and heels. It wasn't completely inevitable."  
"I looked _hot_," Sam countered, sauntering off to the kitchen for a glass of punch. She didn't see him silently agree, looking down at his shoes and conjuring up the image with a slight nod. When he looked up he noticed the box under the Galaxy Wars DVDs and a coupon for 2 lbs of mangos.  
"Hey, Princess Puckett, do you play chess?"  
She leaned against the counter and took an annoyingly long sip of Wahoo, licked her lips and considered.  
"That the one with the horses?"  
Freddie grinned. "Yeah."  
She burped eloquently, and Freddie knew she would agree before she opened her mouth again.

* * *

  
"Red Cross to Web Princess."  
"Tuxedo Man's talkie caught fire..."  
"I thought it might."  
In the studio, Carly opened up a webcam function on her computer. "Positive and Negative have found the bomb," she confirmed.  
"Have you thought of what excuse you're going to use when they figure out you're not in the basement with Spencer?"  
"...uh... yeah. Haven't thought of that, yet."

* * *

  
"Sam. You can't do that."  
"You told me the object of the game was to out the king, Fredward."  
"Be that as it may, you don't start the game like that. White moves first."  
Sam scowled at the board. "If you want to move first, fine. I'm still going to kick your nerd butt at this game."  
Freddie smiled and moved a pawn, setting up his box.  
Sam moved a knight.  
"Sam."  
"I moved it in an 'L' shape," she began to argue.  
"I was just going to say it was a... unique move."  
Her glare softened slightly. "That's me."  
Two of Freddie's pawns fell. Sam lost a rook, two pawns, and a bishop. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders and Freddie could feel her getting ready to physically attack the board.  
"You're doing that thing with your eyebrows again, Freddison."  
"It's just interesting to see you contemplate a move. I didn't think I'd ever see you get _strategical_ over a board game."  
Sam moved her knight. "I think that's called a checkmate, huh, Benson?" She said triumphantly. Freddie regarded his king. This would be the time to use a gambit. They had a bet running: _Loser does the winner one favor, no questions asked_, and Freddie had a few things in mind. Like having Sam replace him in Mother-Son Synchronized Swimming. The King's Gambit was his best move. "Alright, Puckett. Get ready for the beginning of the end," he declared, deliberately lifting a pawn.

* * *

"Tuxedo Man to Web Princess."  
"I thought your talkie was on fire."  
"I found another one and rewired it. Took me a while. I kept getting caught in a conversation with two guys who thought I spoke Spanish and knew how to get to El Paso."  
"Okay... listen, know that I've got you, we have a problem. I told Sam that we were in the storage basement. How am I supposed to get back downstairs?"  
"I'll radio Red Cross for a distraction. How are Negative and Positive doing?"  
Carly cued up the webcam again. "We have confirmation on Phase 2!" she crowed. "They're playing chess, and Sam's doing that thing with her hair." Carly was probably the only one who'd ever gotten Sam to admit that the only reason she never cut her hair was its great sexual appeal. And she sometimes subconsciously let it fall over her shoulders in all its glory around guys.  
"Red Cross to Web Princess. I have a distraction ready. Standby. Initiating in one minute."  
Carly quickly covered her webcam tracks and put the laptop into hibernate mode before leaving the studio and taking the stairs.

* * *

"Freddie! I need your underwear," Mrs. Benson declared, barging into the apartment and circling around so that Sam and Freddie's attention was divereted from the staircase.  
"Mom!" Freddie protested. Her sudden entrance had startled him and the chess board lay overturned on the floor, pieces scattered over the couch and the rug.  
Surprisingly, Sam ignored the completely open interpretation for the need for Freddie's underwear and chose to launch herself at him.  
"You cheat! I was going to beat you and you had to knock the board over!"  
They toppled from couch to coffee table.  
"Sam! It was an accident!"  
Mrs. Benson hovered over them fretting. "Let him go!" If only she had remembered the first aid kit... "Samantha!" she reached out to undo the headlock, and all three of them jumped out of the stress at the sound of a crash. Carly pulled herself up, holding onto the banister.  
"Uh... why do you need Freddie's underwear, Mrs. Benson?" she asked.  
Sam gaped at her, still hanging onto Freddie from behind.


	4. Word Association

**Notes:** Heavily inspired by a fanfic in the _Teen Titans_ fandom and conversations on the couch during commercials.

**Disclaimer:** The awesomeness that is _iCarly_ wrapped up in a quirky Seattle belongs to Dan- the CREATOR MAN - Schneider.

* * *

**Part Four: Word Association**

Kerry Park. There hadn't been any secret matchmaking schemes in months.  
Sam sat on a park bench, wolfing down a hotdog with all the fixings while Freddie muttered under his breath about how she was going to get sick. Eventually. She retorted between bites in words he couldn't quite make out, and they both watched Spencer and Carly laughing and throwing a football back and forth, neither of them very good at it despite Carly's designs on the new star running back of their school football team and Spencer's good-natured ambitions to try out for the Seattle Cobras.  
"Hey, Fredward, let's go feed the ducks," Sam suggested up at once, tossing the paper hotdog tray into a wastebasket and producing two packages of fatcakes from her cargo pockets.  
"Sam. You can't feed fatcake to ducks. You'll make them as round as turkeys."  
"Bacon."  
Freddie raised an eyebrow.  
"Word association. Play along."  
He rolled his eyes but didn't protest. "Canada."  
"French."  
"Yiddish."  
"Hang man."  
"Scrabble."  
Out on the field Carly caught her first pass of the day and danced around in victory, not noticing her two best friends.  
"Elevator."  
"Pillows."  
"Guacamole."  
"Gravy."  
"Meatball."  
"Kiss."  
"Me." Sam wrinkled her nose and made a sour expression. Where did that... She reached out and poked Freddie in the ribs, amused by his confused expression. The bridge of his nose dusked pink and he looked down at his shoes, heaved a sigh, looked up.  
"You," he murmured.  
Sam's stomach flipped in a very un-hotdoglike way. "I won't break your arm," she replied, none too smoothly.

* * *

_Fin_


End file.
